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Is It Time For the US Government To Back Fusion At NIF Over ITER?
ananyo writes "Laser beams at the National Ignition Facility have fired a record 1.875 megajoule shot into its target chamber, surpassing their design specification. The achievement is a milepost on the way to ignition — the 'break-even' point at which the facility will finally be able to release more energy than goes into the laser shot by imploding a target pellet of hydrogen isotopes. NIF's managers think the end of their two-year campaign for break-even energy is in sight and say they should achieve ignition before the end of 2012. However, with scientists at NIF saying that a $4 billion pilot plant could be putting hundreds of megawatts into the grid by the early 2020s, some question whether the Department of Energy is backing the wrong horse with ITER — a $21-billion international fusion experiment under construction at St-Paul-lez-Durance, France. Is it time for the DoE to switch priorities and back NIF's proposals?"
Perhaps a better idea, given the potential benefits of fusion research, would be for the DoE to throw their weight behind multiple projects, rather than sacrificing some to support others.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Just think of the internet you're using to post your comments for an example.
Seems like thorium reactors, which we've already built, and gotten working, are a much more tractable problem.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Basically, this should be a 'hero' project. Like a moon shot. Lets face it, we need to transit off of fossil fuels to a large degree sometime down the line. Not tomorrow. Not next year, but certainly in the next decade or so. Nuclear fission is an option - but as we've seen, not a terribly good one. Solar / wind / hydro / ponies and pixie dust / conservation will also help but we still need a backbone capable of powering modern civilization unless we want to devolve into something less pleasant. And that backbone has to put a lot of gigajoules into the system on a 24/7/365 basis.
So we need to put our money where our collective mouths are and work on something capable of bringing up the entire world to first world standards.
Or fight the war to see who's standing over the oil fields.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'm vaguely familiar with the NIF and their "how it works" section breaks down in great detail everything involved in generating the beam, amplifying the beam, targeting the beam, and imploding the target, but how do they capture the energy produced by the target?
[NIF's managers] say they should achieve ignition before the end of 2012.
I'm guessing their target date is December 21.
Is $4B really that hard to come up with for this project? That sounds a lot cheaper than the constant state of war we find ourselves in today in the Middle East to keep the oil supply flowing.
Or at least let the DoE get involved instead of driving them to the DoD with inter-departmental pissing contests.
For the money that the Polywell people are asking, and what a full-size model would cost compared to the "superconducting cathedrals"* of ITER, they'd be fools to not at least give them a try.
*The late Dr. Bussard sure did know how to turn a phrase. There's no doubt about that, which is more than can be said about the actual Polywell concept itself - at least so far.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
The LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) is a much more promising technology. For starters it's already been done, decades ago at Oak Ridge. It only needs to be commercialized. Also it lacks the hard gamma problems inherent in fusion.
See energyfromthorium.com
The government is getting back its investment on the Internet and the R&D involved. Unless you mean that the government has to make all of the profits on it, I'd say that his point isn't proven. There's nothing wrong with private companies making money off the government's work, unless the government got insufficient return on its own investment.
Both!
Every problem (short of too much entropy in the universe, maybe) becomes easier if you have enough energy. No clean water? Desalinate sea water with tons of energy. Earth too hot? Fuck it, let's build domes under the sea and grow crops with artificial light. Can't get enough rare earths? Mine the living shit out of huge masses of dead earth (I'm assuming the planet is basically fucked by the time we need to do this kind of thing) for the trace minerals. If there's a viable project that has the potential to give us cheap, renewable energy, we should be funding it!
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
NIF itself isn't really the answer, though. It's great for super-dense matter studies and gathering information of use for nuclear bomb detonations, but if the goal is sustainable fusion, NIF's approach is too expensive and inefficient. Rather, you need to go with a variant like HiPER. NIF relies solely on a compression pulse. HiPER uses a compression pulse plus a heating pulse. This allows the compression pulse to be much smaller and easier to achieve.
Teach me to love you, you squishy poet from beyond the stars!
I don't favor either NIF or ITER because frankly I don't care, but I've been hearing "Fusion is almost at the break-even point" for the last 20 years.
In my lexicon almost =/= 20 years and I have to wonder why it was not achieved back in 1995 or 2000 (as they claimed would happen). Perhaps they should be more careful with their claims of "almost there", else we'll start viewing them like the boy who cried wolf.
And for energy sources, why not just burn liquefied sugar (ethanol) and other plant oils in our cars? It's plentiful and renewable and inexhaustible (as long as the sun keeps shining). It appears to be working for the Brazilians.
Another thing that would help is having 1/10th as many people, thereby decreasing the energy need by 1/10th. I think China has the right idea (1 child per couple) even though it is morally repugnant. But then so too is overpopulation and starvation; if we don't limit our growth then Nature will do it for us.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Well, good luck with getting power into the grid by 2020.
The reason why I'm saying this, is that it's an incredibly bold goal to turn the technology they've already got into a working prototype, incorporating everything learnt elsewhere, into a next-generation scientific experiment, let alone a power plant, by 2020. Hell, even HIPER won't break ground before 2020.
Besides, the REAL fun stuff, is things like advanced materials for the combustion chamber, and a working blanket, which NOBODY has yet demonstrated, not JET, not ITER, not NIF -- nobody.
Worse yet, we don't know what problems we'll run into once we achieve ignition in NIF, or the burning plasmas regime in ITER.
To the genius who suggested that ITER is a political waste of time is obviously unfamiliar with the science. Even if ITER achieves its low-balled goals, it'll be a massive step towards a working plant. And they plan to actually test working power-generating, and tritium-breeding blankets as well, although that won't start until quite late in the project (the D-T phase of the project).
The 'patriotic' Americans slagging ITER on /. should be quiet, as the US is, true to form, turning its back on the rest of the world, starving the US Domestic Agency of funding, and doing what it wants anyway.
Those "subsidies" are nothing of the sort, actually--they're actually tax breaks, and they apply to pretty much every industry, not just to Big Oil.
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It seems to be that the thermal energy produced is equal to the optical energy put in. Well, great, it's a milestone of sorts, but still massively far off actually producing energy. First and foremost, conversion of thermal to electrical is 33-40% efficient. Then you have to convert that to optical, an efficiency I do not know, but seems according to the Wiki page to be 1% (422MJ bank, 4MJ shot, could be old). Still, maybe it could be a lot better, but probably wouldn't exceed 80-90%. So, you actually have to beat this "break even" by a factor of at least 3 in order to actually output energy. But that doesn't account for fuel production, nor maintenance or construction of the facility.
And, I should also point out that this story is just that their laser works, not that an sample was fired producing "break even" energy.
Will it work? Maybe. But realistically, by the time we see commercial power from this, a fission plant built today would be reaching end-of-life.
well then Thorium nuclear reactors would seem to be a better bet.
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We need adequate energy sources, and fairness in distributing those resources, to get most of the developing world past the 'demographic transition'. It's a big ask, but could be done if we were truly determined.
Fusion is _hard_. We had no idea how hard it would be until we tried doing it -- mostly because of unknown unknowns. It's took only a few short years (maybe 10?) to turn Fermi's first nuclear pile into a working power plant. Fusion is one to two /orders of magnitude/ more complex to pull off. So obviously, we're going to have to wait longer for a working power plant. If ITER works (and we're now confident it will), the first prototype power plants (the DEMO machines) won't be far behind.
Not to mention the awkward little problem of cheaply manufacturing those ultra-precise little fuel targets, and positioning them quickly and accurately enough inside the reactor for it to be practical.
My money's on ITER. Machines that produce actual fusion power (Joint European Torus) already exist.
I have been hearing about biofuels since the early 80's so I don't think they have a record that is any better than fusion.
Brazil is still mostly dependent on fossil fuels. Gasoline there is a 25/75 ethanol/gas blend.
A population reduction - are you volunteering?
Doesn't the government get its money back in the form of taxes from the Internet companies that wouldn't exist without it?
Ezekiel 23:20
In my lexicon almost =/= 20 years and I have to wonder why it was not achieved back in 1995 or 2000
because 20 years previous we hadn't signed on the dotted line to do it.
Its kind of like building a house. I can hire out to get one built in a year, anytime I want to start ... but until I sign on the dotted line its going to perpetually be "a year away".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
i thought you were serious until you mentioned the charlatan Rossi. Go kill yourself.
Really now, they've fired ~2MJ pulse. But what does that mean? 2MJ of laser light was present in their test chamber. This was fueled by 400MJ of electrical energy stored in capacitors. So we can now see that they have accomplished making a 0.5% efficient laser. This is nothing to write home about. Lets consider the actual fusion power output. The most they've had is about 1kJ of fusion energy output. This is not a lot. The balance between energy in and energy out is very poor. Getting 1kJ from 400MJ is about the best they can hope for. An overall efficiency of 0.00025%. Who here thinks that's good? JET, which is the smaller brother of ITER has achieved a 90% energy balance. Still not breaking even, but still 3600 times closer. ITER is designed to output 10 times more energy than is input. So it'll spank NIF. QED. That doesn't stop it being expensive though...
Not just Thorium, and there's probably better designs out by now anyway, but I for one was very pissed and still am that Clinton canceled America's Integral Fast Reactor project. Because ohhh scary nuclear. Except the IFRs produce less waste, safer waste, and can be fed just about anything, including most the crap that right now is considered waste.
Bad project, Bill kill!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
What's with spergy computer nerds and libertarianism? I guess it must be appealing to reduce the complexity and unavoidable ambiguity of human society into just a couple of quasi-moral rules pulled out of nowhere.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
On the one hand we have widespread access to information and educational content and a marketplace that allows individuals to benefit from globalisation for a change. On the other hand, we have 4chan and facebook. So, I'd say it's too close to call...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"By that argument...blah"
Nonsense.
He means a project in a similar manner to the "hero" projects of old, like Apollo, and Project Manhattan. Where you basically say "cost be damned, were doing this". Either for prestige (Apollo), or self defence ( project M ), or saving our collective asses ( cheap fusion power )
Investing a huge fortune in money on inventing a commercial grade reactor does not automatically imply that the resulting commercial design will be as expensive to mass produce as the money spent on R&D.
Even though their proof of concept system may not ultimately be the best way to fusion, they invented a HELL of a lot of technology in the process of getting there. Those laser pulses are amplified by sheets of giant crystals, so they had to invent a process to extrude them. And they always knew that their system was merely a demonstration of what could be done: they hope to license the technology to private energy companies who want an alternative to nuclear. Without the R&D component, the price tag of a NIF style fusion plant should drop from four billion down to 200-300 million, on par with the initial investment cost of a nuclear power plant. (I toured the facility a few years ago. Holy moly that place is cool and awesome. And the wine off Tesla Road is pretty good, too.)
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Sugar cane also works for Brazil because they don't have nearly as many cars on the road in the first place. There's also the very serious hazard of using arable land to grow fuel rather then food, and the follow on effects that can have on global food prices.
Biofuels are really a non-starter - it's inefficient solar power, with all sorts of limitations and where and how much of it you can use. It also is only an answer for transportation fuel at that. There's no possible way we could satiate our electricity demands using biofuels (when you need 60% of the arable land in the US to manage the oil needs of transportation alone - optimistically).
Fusion research has to be done, no matter the cost, until we either definitely establish it can't be done, or we succeed. Given the positive results that we have that, it seems likely we can succeed - but nothing that complex is ever easy or quick.
The really touching part is that you really believe that without a Government, there wouldn't be violence and people taking by force.
From what I've read, as bad as Somalia is today, it was worse when it had a government.
Certainly given that governments have killed hundreds of millions of people in the last century I would say that private sector murderers would have to work pretty hard to catch up.
Why the fuck do people keep on mentioning Thorium reactors? They still produce fission products. And fission products are the only thing that nuclear reactors need to protect against releasing to the public. Fission products are also statistically determined. You will always get short medium and long term radionuclides even if you burn up some.
There are benefits to Thorium reactors, but in a major accident they will still release enough highly radioactive substances that will require evacuation and quarantine of the affected area for decades. Yes, a thorium reactor can still meltdown, it still has decay heat, and it would require complex engineered safeguards to protect it.
I guess it must be appealing to reduce the complexity and unavoidable ambiguity of human society to something that can be solved via one-size-fits-most central planning by an Intelligent Designer, a noble bureaucrat with a brilliant mind and a crystal ball.
Yep, spergy computer nerd incapable of making subtle distinctions right there. You manage to put up both a straw man and a false dichotomy. Primarily because there's no other way to support your argument.
Here's your problem: you correctly identify some of the problems that government has, but then decide to solve them by throwing out all government. You are completely clueless as to the requirements for a functioning society, as well as the costs necessary to maintain it. The correct discussion is to talk about whether the money is better spent elsewhere. Your blanket squeal about thievery is completely, utterly sophomoric.
localized, decentralized experiments are essential to peaceful evolution towards a prosperous world.
And you also managed to get evolution wrong. Here's a little hint: evolution has nothing to do with a better world, or more prosperous world. Only with who makes more kids.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Ironically, you are the one who has put up straw men and a false dichotomy.
I don't state that all government should be thrown out. Rather, I imply that the power structure should be decentralized and localized as much as possible.
Firstly, evolution is a process; biological evolution just happens to be the most prominent example of evolution.
Secondly, evolution is defined by 2 phenomena: Variation and Selection. For the record, neither of these phenomena need be random or even mindless (especially selection).
Is that enough spoonfeeding and hand-holding for your mind?
I love how projected "breakeven" and "ignition" in 2012 has suddenly been extrapolated to MW powerplants on the grid within a decade.
Nevermind that we don't capture the energy yet, which might give us best-case 50% efficiency. Nevermind we need 3x breakeven the breakeven energy for converting heat into steam to power a turbine. Nevermind just about every factor of 2-3 efficiency loss out there. I'm going to post one goddamn link that was true when I interned there, and is still consistent today and then I want to see what the "scientists" who projected this commercial powerplant planned to do about this minor detail:
http://www.ieer.org/reports/fusion/chap3.html
By contrast, a large commercial power plant using ICF will require around five shots per second. Laser drivers also have low efficiencies, currently around 1% for solid-state lasers such as those to be used in NIF.
99% efficiency loss right off the bat. What's left for these people to even argue about?
A population reduction - are you volunteering?
A large part of the Slashdot readership is doing exactly what is necessary for population reduction. Some of them even voluntarily.
Why the fuck do people keep on mentioning Thorium reactors? They still produce fission products. And fission products are the only thing that nuclear reactors need to protect against releasing to the public. Fission products are also statistically determined. You will always get short medium and long term radionuclides even if you burn up some.
There are benefits to Thorium reactors, but in a major accident they will still release enough highly radioactive substances that will require evacuation and quarantine of the affected area for decades. Yes, a thorium reactor can still meltdown, it still has decay heat, and it would require complex engineered safeguards to protect it.
You do realize that EXISTING thorium reactor designs -
1. Do not need water as coolant (hence no high pressure evironment and much smaller)
2. As designed will shutdown on their own with no outside intervention.
3. As designed they can't "overheat".
"Best results occur with molten salt reactors (MSRs), such as ORNL's liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), which have built-in negative-feedback reaction rates due to salt expansion and thus reactor throttling via load. This is a great safety advantage, since no emergency cooling system is needed, which is both expensive and adds thermal inefficiency. In fact, an MSR was chosen as the base design for the 1960s DoD nuclear aircraft largely because of its great safety advantages, even under aircraft maneuvering. In the basic design, an MSR generates heat at higher temperatures, continuously, and without refuelling shutdowns, so it can provide hot air to a more efficient (Brayton Cycle) turbine. An MSR run this way is about 30% better in thermal efficiency than common thermal plants, whether combustive or traditional solid-fuelled nuclear.[27]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Commercial_nuclear_power_station
4. The US has a metric fuckton of thorium in it's coal deposits.
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You basically stated how American economy works: government funds research (usually for military purposes) than then "leaks" in the private sector. It's not necessarily a bad thing: this leaks are ultimately what made the difference in wealth between the people in USA and in the Soviet Union, where such technologies wouldn't pass to civil engineering. However, whoever believes tha the power and wealth of the USA come from privately funded self-made men, is uttelry fooling himself.
Starting with the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel, name anything that man has discovered or invented, that has not been used for both good and evil.
That said, I believe that inertial laser fusion, if commercial fusion happens at all, is the only way. What they are doing at the NIF, has basically been done and proven to work. It is called an H-bomb. Their goal is to explode nano H-bombs, about 15 per second. The energy of their micro-explosions can be harnessed to produce useful power. Maybe someone good at math here, could calculate the energy output of a stick or two of dynamite exploding 15 times per second continually! How many sticks of dynamite would it take at 15 times per second, to eventually push the stated goal of 200MW into the power grid?
There are really no theoretical physics problems to be solved here, only some rather formidable engineering challenges. That is not true of the magnetic confinement approach. That system faces some formidable holes in our basic understanding in the behavior of extremely high density plasmas in intense magnetic fields. If I were a betting man, I would wager on the NIF approach to be eventually successful.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Not to mention the awkward little problem of cheaply manufacturing those ultra-precise little fuel targets, and positioning them quickly and accurately enough inside the reactor for it to be practical.
This is the part that makes me call B.S. The fuel pellets contain tritium, which as far as I know requires a fission reactor to produce. Right now the fuel pellets aren't even the primary target of the NIF's lasers - instead, they encapsulate it in a little shell called a hohlraum, which I believe is currently made from gold, although other materials are possible too. So this is quite incredibly expensive fuel, and they're going to be blasting them at a rate of 15 per second. Considering the NIF cost $3.5 billion to do one shot at a time, I'm not sure where the $4 billion figure is coming from. On the bright side, they don't need hundreds of thousands of miles of superconducting wire like ITER does.
On the bright side, if they can get something like this to work it's potentially useful for interstellar travel.
My money's on ITER.
I'm sure ITER could be made to work. The problem is twofold: first, it's not actually an optimal design for a production power plant; the current plans are significantly scaled down from what was originally intended. Second, the capital costs for one of these are simply extraordinary. Of course ITER is going way over budget in part due to the fact that it's uniquely massive and there is some politics involved (for instance, because every country contributing gets rights to all of the technology developed, manufacturing is being spread out in very inefficient ways), but devices like this are probably never going to be easy or cheap to build.
The US is bleeding $100 billion a year every year to fight various wars that were largely the fantasy of a mad Texan. Let's say that there's 10 fusion projects with a serious potential of actually breaking through and you fund each at $10 billion more than current - but just as a one-off. So for one additional year, the US bleeds another $100 billion but after that the bleeding stops.
Without any further changes, the net result would be that the money saved would exceed the interest paid on the deficit. Not by much, but by enough. This prevents your fear of a US shutdown. Well, unless a Republican gets into office and destroys the economy again. (Don't blame fusion for your financial problems, blame your own greed for tax cuts. Fusion scientists aren't to blame, you are.) The economy would not only stabilize, but grow. In growing, more revenue is generated, reducing the deficit further. You get positive feedback. The nation will return to where it was before Bush took office.
Not only that, but the cash injection would likely lead to major developments in fusion technology, leading to cheaper power, cleaner power, fewer industrial accidents (and lower healthcare costs as a result), fewer rolling blackouts (if any) in power-hungry cities (and therefore greater productivity, leading to more money earned and thus a stronger economy).
Of course, we could choose your option. Do nothing, go nowhere, watch as the third world overtakes the US in technology (it already has overtaken the US in life expectancy and is running neck-and-neck on education), watch as the US disintegrates and plunges into a national Dark Age (it's dangerously close to one as it is, between the DMCA, current US patent laws and the near-total disintegration of the public infrastructure).
Don't waste my time, or anyone else's, with "reasons" why that won't happen. It is not merely likely, it is inevitable. The decisions over the next couple of years will decide if the US is doomed to mimic every Dark Age that has ever happened OR if it will choose a path of sustainable enlightenment. Just as a star without a core will implode, an empire without a drive to progress will implode. Stagnate and you die.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There are uses for fission byproducts you know? Nuclear medicine saves more peoples lives then reactor accidents have ever taken.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
When I worked at the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy in the early 90's, we referred to ITER as "money ITER".
Buzz, it's 2.2 dickwads per metric fuckton. The imperial fuckton is a Longton, thus there are 1.5 metric fucktons per Imperial Fuckton.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
You keep hearing about thorium reactor, because a lot of people are convinced it would be a very good idea to do this based on the options that are clearly possible in the near term. Maybe, you should do your own research on the LFTR reactor and see why lots of people think so. And just so you know (in case you did not), fusion will also have radioactive byproducts, expected to be less of a problem than LFTR reactors though.
Ultimately might be able to get LFTR power for as low USD 0.01 per kwh, and there are millions of years worth of it. This excites people, we've never seen large scale energy this cheap or this long-term, not in the history of the world. Fusion won't hit this price for a long time, if ever.
Every large-scale technology has risks. People are killing by falling of the roof installing solar panels. Coal -- you get pollution, explosions and mine collapses -- and plenty of radiation, coal being mixed with thorium and uranium, we shove plenty of radiation into the air when burning coal. People die from natural gas, hydro, wind, wood and candles too.
I just don't know that we can afford to wait another 50 or 100 years for Fusion to be viable on a large commercial scale. There are just not many options that allow the whole planet to have power intensive economies. It is morally wrong as far as I am concerned to decide that others should not have abundant power, while I get to keep mine, or even worse, that no-one is allowed abundant power. Widespread death, disease, etc. will rule.
Bet on fusion, please go right ahead. Bet on solar power satellites, too. Bet on anti-matter production production in solar orbit near Mercury too, but please lets be sure to bet on something very likely to keep us in the game until we get the "perfect" sollution. I.e., Bet on LFTR as a safe bet, if not the perfect solution.
How do you generate hydrogen in a molten salt reactor? What's the source?
The Fukushima reactors generated it because the water was boiling to steam and reacting with the zirconium-cladded fuel canisters. There are no such canisters in a molten salt reactor, and there is also no water and no pressurisation of the containment structure (what's the vapour pressure of Lithium Fluoride anyway? ;) ).
The danger of overheating is also removed - the fuel is already molten *by design*, and is contained in the system by a plug of solid fuel that is kept below the melting point by active cooling. Should the power fail (or the temperature of the fuel go too high for the cooling if the plug to cope), the plug of fuel melts and the whole primary loop drains off and settles in a non-critical arrangement run off area. It will then either solidify, or remain as a liquid if the temperature is high.
Unfortunately Thorium is naturally found in a highly insoluble state so does not concentrate well into ore seams as does Uranium; instead Thorium generally finds itself dispersed as sands. Extracting the Thorium requires extensive mining and intensive processing, producing byproducts worse than Uranium mining. Processing Thorium ore into more useful fuel pellets for HWR or graphite moderated adjustable piles is only marginally better (energy, pollution, cost of plant) than processing Uranium into SEU, even though Thorium does not require enrichment (i.e., the processes are based on chemistry rather than isotopes). Thorium forms awkward compounds in chemical slurries - daughter products in LFTR were chemically hazardous, an explosion and corrosion risk, radioactive and had a tendency to decay into even more awkward compounds during cooling (not what you want in a SCRAM).
The primary reason BARC explored the Thorium fuel cycle so thoroughly was that India is very poor in known Uranium deposits, but has an enormous amount of Thorium sands domestically. Before rapprochement with nonproliferation politics, Thorium was its only bet without compromising its particular political neutrality with respect to the declared nuclear weapons states; its access to Uranium was almost certainly entirely reserved for weapons development. Things have changed now, and the Thorium fuel cycle is looking less attractive for several reasons. Cost of fuel is high on that list, since there is now an abundance of SEU to HEU available to it through trade. Consequently, BARC's optimistic projections of large numbers of Thorium fuel cycle civil power generation plants look far too aggressive.
That said, they or the South Koreans might buy AECL and integrate its civil power knowledge, patents, and processes surrounding e.g. CANFLEX, in which case mixed-fuel-cycle HWRs seem almost practical, depending on the capital costs and financing compared to buying an EPR or equivalent. Modern very high burn-up LWRs are more attractive for power generation than modern HWRs for a variety of reasons (cost of moderator, higher thermal output, neutron economy has been getting better in modern LWRs, and so forth).
Meanwhile the most likely use for Thorium fuel cycles is in chained or stacked fast breeders researching the production of higher thermal power and the breeding of weaponizable isotopes. Safety is less of a concern with that particular goal in mind, so molten slurry cores, high temperature highly chemically active coolants, and so forth are more likely to find use (as at ORNL).